


A Dream in Another Tongue

by bioluminesce



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Calendrical Heresy, Family Feels, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-15
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:12:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21809326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bioluminesce/pseuds/bioluminesce
Summary: If joining the Kel was like waking up from a dream, leaving them was like learning she had never truly understood wakefulness. (A character study about Cheris and the Mwennin.)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 24
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	A Dream in Another Tongue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sophiegaladheon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiegaladheon/gifts).



At first, newly-renamed Kel Cheris wished more of her classmates had heard of the Mwennin, so that home felt less like a dream. Instead, it _was_ a dream, and the ashhawk was a kind of waking. Every day, fold sheets, tug her uniform straight, check her appearance, march with the others into the waking world. The world is the Kel dormitories and muster fields and the other people around her with the red ashhawks on their shoulders. She is proud to be in this world, and to have left the previous dream behind.

Not to say she is not awake, is not conscious, is not fully aware of what she is intentionally doing, when she writes letters to her parents. It is just like reaching into another world.

On the morning when she is first going to test her formation conditioning, she sits down to write. The injection sites in her upper arm ache, and she rubs them absently. Two sites: an older one for the most advanced batch of formation instinct itself, and a newer one for what she will later learn is phobic conditioning. She remembers her parents’ faces when she showed them her acceptance to Kel academy, the gold filigree, the pride almost wafting from the crisp paper. She had been so nervous when she had told them. Would it be a betrayal? Would they be proud of the thing she had wanted for so long, or would it be nothing to them, less than the ripple of a pebble in the water? She wanted to serve them well, and, was that love? She was not sure. What was the difference between care and servitude? She scratches the ink against the paper, each Mwen-dal character more shaky than the last.

That dream:

She had been standing between worlds. Standing between the Mwennin ghetto and the place where the rest of the City of Ravens Feasting began. Gray roads, gray buildings, blue sky, brightly colored signage, the chatter of people here and there on the curving street but no one in her vicinity. People here skulked. Something in the shoulders, she thought when she was too young to know better, told the desperate from the brave. (The two were not different, could not be told apart. They needed to be re-named to be differentiated.)

Videos of remembrances would play on one side of the street and not the other, passersby averting their eyes or lending their attention as they preferred. That split was not necessarily between Mwen-dal and Hexarchate citizens either. The road was tinder waiting for a spark, and a spark busting into life over and over again, both at once, a conflagration never heating up, a person dying on a screen on the side of a building surrounded by the paraphernalia that made the scene not terrible but beautiful. Remove one bit of ritual and a remembrance was just a person bleeding.

And people walked back and forth. All of this the blood of her culture and the culture next door, flooding in her veins, pushing a mind she already feels disconnected from. Her pinky finger on her writing hand taps the top of the desk. What would her family think? She writes truth, knowing most of it will be redacted. She writes in childish sentences, forgetting words in Mwen-dal, horrified by the blank spaces in her memory but not yet by the words of the high language that replace them.

She tries to forget that her father might feel guilty, her mother might feel disgusted.

It is easy.

The Kel academy made it easy.

At first it had been strange for her to recognize baseline body language and hierarchical postures; it was a language she had never spoken, a sudden and thick dividing line between Kel and non-Kel, enlisted and officers. What would she see if she left the training halls? Would she be able to recognize if a person stood like an officer? She wanted to find connections, patterns, equations to apply Kel rankings to the rest of the world.

Later, she would find this horrible.

Later, she would wonder whether this was an intentional part of the training.

One language replaced another. Her worry about her family was replaced by her worries about her performance.

And the next day, she stands for the first time as part of a formation.

The Kel fledges do not fidget. They can hardly be seen to breathe under their identical uniforms. The red banners on the wall stand just like the people to her left and right, hard-angled and still.

A servitor scrubs along the far wall, its spiderform low and unobtrusive, white against white walls. The motion of its legs horrifies her, makes her want to shiver. She suppresses even this, one instinct overriding another.

_It’s in the manuals: servitors are formation-neutral._

That’s what formations do, Cheris thinks. The process makes you believe you are neutral. You are not part of the spinning, marching group. You are a bystander in your own immolation. You cannot do anything to stop this.

Their officer calls for First Formation.

And people walk back and forth, and Cheris walks in step. At first she understands the math behind the formation, the geometry between each person, the alignment toward the site of the remembrances and in acknowledgement of the number of remembrances performed on this calendar year, on this calendar day. She can see the numbers as clear as she can see the Kel. She is standing between four other people. She can see the Kel at the end of the hooks of First Formation, but she is calm in the center, bolstered by her fellows.

She had been injected with a horror of insects. More spiderforms crowd the room, then worms and beetles.

She does not break formation.

Other Kel do; she sees them run screaming from the crowd. They bump into others in their panic, but the others do not move, standing straight as a spear. The swords at their side hardly shiver.

Cheris is horrified and calm at once, and she does not move.

* * *

At the end of the day, she tries to write home. She knows the words, but cannot think of what to say.

* * *

Later, sitting on a hillside in a new Mwennin colony, Ajewen ( _Ajewen_ , not Kel, and _certainly_ not Jedao) Cheris does not think of herself as a fool.

She was young, yes. She regrets. She also acted on the information presented to her. Sometimes that was literal, such as with the First Formation. Sometimes it was less clear, such as every decision she made since she met Neshte Khiruev and Shuos Jedao. She wishes she could tell her parents that while their ideology was without direction, it was correct, and she would become the direction.

Living in the colony does not feel like a dream from which she needs to wake up. Everything, including the Jedao-voice that has almost entirely integrated into her own, feels crisp and clarified.

She speaks Mwen-dal better now. Like a native. Like a person who never left. But within Mwen-dal are ever-smaller delineations, from regions to friend groups, and she does not have the slang of the ghetto of City of Ravens Feasting. Dzannis Paral does not have that. She does not have the same face as when she left home. Her parents would not recognize her haircut, or deeper things, the shape of her cheekbones and and the width of her nose.

But she likes to think they would recognize her handwriting, halting as it is, and in another world where her story was kinder none of them would have had to experience those changes at all. 

Oru (an Oru, not a teacher but a student—the name is common in the colony, for it means “memory”) runs up the grassy hill toward her. “Come play! You can referee.”

Oru runs back down the hill without waiting for an answer.

From here she can see the exercise field and the prefab homes. People stand on porches and talk, or walk the perimeter. The children split into loose teams on the field. No touch of formation instinct reaches here; no one wears the posture of an officer.

Cheris walks, then jogs, after Oru, and feels at home.


End file.
